Jungle Scout is Hiring We're looking for 16+ people in various roles, both remote and at one of our two offices in Canada or the US. If you're interested, go ahead and check out the opportunities that are available. And if you'd like to learn why I love working for Jungle Scout, keep on reading. One Night in Bangkok I'm tired. Exhausted. No surprise, really. Yesterday I was running through a street market in Bangkok trying to outrun Becky Frost in a race to find a carrot. Yes, a carrot. And she runs pretty darn fast, too (by the way, this would be the first of many battles that Frosty and I would get into this week). In fact, there were a few of us from Jungle Scout running to find this elusive carrot. Shane Stinemetz, the Vice President of Operations. Patryk Wójcik, one of our customer success specialists. Kaia Olson, a full stack developer. Most of us were dropped off by a tuck-tuck driver with little to no direction or clues. This made the scavenger hunt pretty tough. Eventually, we figured out where the carrot was and moved on to the next challenge in the race. And that was just ... Read More

Over the last decade, marketers’ opinions of events have gone up and down. To some, events can be a monumental waste of money. But to many others, there’s an increasing sense of value in running expos and conferences. They bring your best customers together and attract a wider audience from your target market.

It’s what happens at the event that matters. In fact, according to Event Manager Blog, 91% of event organizers and marketers believe that increasing engagement is an important priority during events.

In this blog, I’ll outline five strategies to boost event engagement. Each technique uses technology and event marketing trends to keep attendees engaged, boost social proof, and improve the content around your event.

1. Engage With Influencers

Influencer marketing is a hot topic across many marketing channels. Your event marketing strategy is no exception. By engaging with thought leaders across content marketing and social channels, ticket sales can receive an unprecedented increase.

The approach you choose will depend on your objectives:

Content & awareness: Collaborating with influencers to create content before and after your event. This approach adds an element of social proof and helps tap into a wider audience.

Advocacy: This long-term goal means working exclusively with influencers to create content, letting them tell their story about your brand.

Start by listing out the target influencers you wish to collaborate with on content. There are different kinds of influencers that range in difficulty to reach.

For example, micro-influencers usually have a follower size of 1,000 to 100,000 but have a highly engaged audience. Then there are those who can be considered “celebrities,” with follower numbers in the millions. These are sought-after by brands who wish to boost brand awareness. Paid influencer platforms, such as NeoReach and HYPR, can help you identify and connect with relevant influencers. They use algorithms that pool data from all social networks, which makes finding the right influencers easy. Manual outreach is also effective, as you’re building a relationship directly with your target influencers. Do this by engaging with them on social media first. Contribute to the content they create, and help them share it.

You can also take advantage of the media buzz and borrow social proof with publications. WebEngage does this on the front page of their website:

Get your influencers involved in the entire event organization and promotion process. Thanks to the open nature of social media, this is now easier than ever before.

2. Gamification & Contests

People love to test their luck. Contests are a creative way of leveraging this desire, offering relevant prizes to get attendees to interact and contribute to your event. Giving away free Apple products used to be exciting and engaging. But this form of incentive has suffered the same fate as banner blindness. People are simply no longer excited by fancy gadgets.

The best prizes, therefore, are relevant to your event topic or value proposition. Work with exhibitors and speakers, encouraging them to contribute prizes. These could include:

Free access to software for three to six months

Consultation with experts on a specific topic (such as a “30-minute call to analyze your content marketing strategy”)

Tickets for next year’s event

The question then comes down to using this to inspire engagement. One of the best ways to do this is to ask for submissions in the form of tweets or Instagram posts. There are many benefits to this. First, you create a ton of buzz around the event on third-party channels, which builds upon your credibility. Social proof is imperative for securing attendees, sponsors, and exhibitors for future events. Furthermore, you now have a host of user-generated content (UGC) to use in future marketing collateral. Again, this helps build social proof for your brand while adding visual and multimedia formats to your content.

T-Mobile ran a contest like this on social media, offering to pay the cancellation fees of their current provider. Entrants were encouraged to write a breakup letter to their provider for the chance to win:

The result? Over 80,000 “letters” were submitted. A huge amount of buzz was generated on social media while attracting new customers at the same time.

Look for creative ways to encourage the creation of UGC while adding value to your attendees. Social media and media buzz are two event promotion channels that will benefit as a result.

3. Use Live Polls

Asking for a show of hands or doing a manual headcount can turn people off. It’s also an ineffective way to get a dynamic depth of opinions.

This is where live polling comes in. It lets your audience engage with keynotes and speeches as they happen. It turns a one-way stream of content into a conversation, which is key for engagement on a wide scale and makes your presentations more memorable.

Ask thought-provoking questions to get your attendees opinions on a topic. For example, speakers can poll attendees, providing the rest of the audience with insights into the challenges of their peers.

While this adds a social aspect to your event, the real value is in the feedback. Using the answers from this poll, speakers can direct their content accordingly. The feedback can be used to direct sessions towards topics the audience finds most interesting.

Polls can even provide insight and value for marketers after the event is over. The feedback it generates is a great source of content, giving you insights on blog topics and ideas for long-form content, such as ebooks. Of course, you can then use this to inform the content of future events.

Simon Puleo used live polling when training HP’s sales teams on presenting new products to clients. This involves attending large sales conferences all over the world with up to 800 attendees each. To keep sales professionals engaged, he encouraged individuals to come on stage and give their best pitch. Other attendees voted which they thought was most effective, adding a competitive element to the event.

When trying this yourself, run a poll at the beginning of your sessions. This approach will get the audience comfortable with the way voting works and the system itself. Keep it fun, so it’s easy to participate. From here, use it to generate feedback, direct the flow of the session and collect metrics for optimization of future events.

4. Create a Mobile App

The entire event engagement process, from your website to registration, can feel disjointed. Even the collateral that your attendees pick up on the day can be a little clunky. What if you could house your entire event marketing funnel under one roof? With mobile apps, you can.

What you include in our app depends on the nature of the event. Here are some typical features that most event apps include:

Rich media: A steady stream of relevant content, often in the form of an activity stream

Social media: Integrate with your social campaigns (perfect when accompanied by the UGC technique explained earlier)

Interactive maps: Allows attendees to create a schedule that suits them

One of the most powerful features your app provides is analytics. Optimize your future events by providing the right insights.

South by Southwest (SXSW) created SXSW GO, an app that helped festival attendees navigate the huge annual event in Austin. Their objective was to improve the overall experience and eliminate friction when registering and networking during the event.

Using iBeacons, introduced in 2014, attendees can see users that were around them to facilitate a richer networking experience. This technology allows attendees to reach out and arrange meetups during the event, providing flexible and targeted networking opportunities.

This level of integration also generated a huge amount of data. Attendee behavior, popular sessions, and content engagement are all insights that can optimize future events.

5. Virtual Event Bags

How much money do you and your sponsors spend on event swag each year? More importantly, do you know the ROI and where all those tote bags, booklets, pens, and badges end up?

There’s a lot of potential for waste. Not only that, this physical collateral is very hard to measure, which is why marketers and event organizers are moving over to “virtual event bags.”

These online goody bags help deliver measurable results while removing the clunky process of managing digital assets. With the right platform, it can be a collaborative process that gives your sponsors complete control over what they include.

The layout is simple but effective. Everything is laid out in an easy-to-use format. Friction is minimal, and attendees aren’t overwhelmed with the amount of “stuff” filling up their desks the next day. Furthermore, organizers can see which offers work better than others. This will let them prove their worth to sponsors when selling future events, while also optimizing copy and creative for higher conversions.

The possibilities for improving your event engagement are endless—and exciting! What methods are you currently employing to engage with your event attendees? Join the conversation in the comments section below.

If you are a marketer, you probably think of yourself as a creative person, and when you think legal, maybe you think…not so creative. But is this a fair assessment? As someone with experience in both marketing and legal departments, I can say both are driven by a determination help the customer succeed. In this blog, I’ll outline five tips to help your marketing and legal teams work better together.

Help Me Help You

Perhaps the biggest misconception about legal is that it is their job to say no. But that is simply not true. Legal wants to say yes. Yes to connecting with the customer. Yes to showcasing our company. Yes to helping our team. In-house counsel wants to help you create the best possible relationship with the customer. At the same time, however, our job is ultimately about limiting risk. While this means we cannot always say yes right away, it also means we will work tirelessly to help you until we can.

We Like to Read…But Not That Much

It is not wrong to assume that most members of your legal team enjoy reading and writing since it is such an integral part of our daily work. I know I do! But here is a little secret; sometimes, thinking like a member of a legal team is as simple as using your critical reading skills. One of the best ways to help me help you is to put on your lawyer hat and read through a document before coming to legal. That way, you’ll have a much better understanding of what questions to ask, and how we can help.

All This = Creative Collaboration

Just as marketers work creatively and collaboratively to share their message, a legal team brings the same spirit to drawing up contracts and negotiating deals. This creative energy not only runs through teams, it can also exist between them. Next time you approach legal, instead of simply handing something off, consider ways you can work together to solve your challenges. With a little preparation beforehand, you’re already halfway to a solution.

We’re More Than Just “the Law”

It’s important to remember that, just as your interests don’t all center around marketing, your legal team’s interests don’t all center around the law. It’s also important to remember that legal advice regarding personal matters should be solicited from your attorney. The casual conversation with someone from your legal team at the water cooler about your neighbor’s incessant dog barking, and what you should do about it, isn’t legal advice. Just like this blog you’re reading isn’t legally binding.

The Secret Weapon of the Marketer

Last, but certainly not least, marketers can share their passion for the product they’re marketing with their legal team. You know what sets your product apart and makes it special in a way legal might not. Imparting this knowledge and passion with the legal team is a way to share your message. After all, it’s not just about reaching customers, it’s also about educating employees within your company as well.

How is your relationship with your legal team? What might you do differently when you approach a situation that requires your legal team? I’d love to hear about it.

A few months ago, I wrote a basic guide on How To Setup A Campaign In Quora Ads. At the time the guide was written, our team was in the early phase of testing the various campaign and targeting options available within the platform. After a few months of testing and collecting data, I want to circle back and detail what targeting is working and what isn’t for our team in Quora.

Since launching in December, Quora has performed extremely well in terms of delivering cheap, qualified leads to our client in the software industry. The cost per lead in Quora is less than half of what we are experiencing in AdWords over the same period. The biggest challenge our team has faced in Quora is scalability. The Quora interface is still lacking key metrics, like impression share, that are helpful in setting budgets and adjusting bids.

Because of the current platform limitations, our account’s main objective has been to grow volume as much as possible to take advantage of Quora’s relatively cheap leads. With relatively few levers to pull, we decided to test the various targeting types and craft our expansion strategy from the results. Please note that all the campaigns we ran were conversion campaigns.

What Works

Topic Targeting

Topic targeting has been by far the most successful targeting type for our test in terms of delivering the highest conversion volume. With the Topic targeting type, text ads will appear next to content associated with designated topics in Quora. The general idea is that your ads will show broadly in discussion threads that fall within the selected topics.

Quora will make topic recommendations based on a list of keywords that you enter into the interface. More than one topic can be targeted per ad group, allowing you to group closely related topics.

Topic targeting worked great for us because of its ability to deliver a large amount of traffic and conversions.

Audience Targeting

The audience remarketing campaigns that we setup in Quora performed well in terms of having a high conversion rate, although overall conversion volume was relatively low. Quora makes setting up audiences easy, with everything necessary right in the interface.

Our team tested several audiences over the last months including website visitors, non-converters, and past converters. The non-converters audience performed best for us. We experienced an extremely high conversion rate, although overall volume was limited.

What Didn’t Work

Question Targeting

Question targeting was the least productive targeting option in terms of delivering traffic, Question targeting allows you to decide specifically what questions or discussion threads you want your ad to show up on. This extremely granular option would be great if you need to control exactly where and how your ad will show, but we found that this option simply doesn’t deliver enough impressions to be successful.

Other Notes

Interest Targeting

Interest targeting is a targeting option that our team has not yet tested. With interest targeting, Quora gives you a recommended list of targets based on keywords that are entered. Ads will show to users who have the same interests as selected in your targeting.

Our team found it challenging to identify personal interests that would closely aligned with our B2B product. If you are advertising a more consumer-focused product, this targeting setting will likely have a broad reach, like topic targeting.

Bidding

As mentioned previously, Quora bidding remains a challenge due to the lack of data the platform shares. Our team has been making bid adjustments to keep our bids within the recommended range that Quora gives in the interface. While this strategy has worked so far, it would be extremely helpful if Quora provided additional data that would be helpful in bidding and setting budgets.

Bidding is an area where the platform will need to develop further. It is difficult to develop an overall budgeting and bidding strategy with no back-end data.

Conclusion

Quora is certainly worth testing if you have a B2B product based on the inexpensive cost of leads and relevance of Quora’s topics and interests. With B2B CPCs rising in AdWords and LinkedIN, Quora could be your account’s next big win.

We've covered a lot of ground here in the Genius Series, and hopefully you're starting to get a good feel for what to sell on Amazon. First, we discussed the basics of sourcing products online and how our tens of thousands of data points used by our proprietary Accusales™ technology provides the best Amazon product research information in the world. Then, we covered 10 big DON'Ts when researching products on Amazon. And now we will cover something a little different. We're going to talk about LOVE. Two kinds of love, in fact. After all, today's Valentine's day. So, what better day to discuss what to sell on Amazon that will make you and your customers fall head-over-heels? But first, let's discuss the two private label selling methods. What to Sell on Amazon: Two Methods The Logic Method The first method is all about logic-based selling. In this method, when you're looking for what to sell on Amazon, you're looking only for products that fall directly into our suggested benchmarks: high volume (250-400 units/month), low competition (less than 100 reviews), a sales price between $25-$35, good gross margins, low seasonality, no legal issues, lightweight, and can be improved upon. Logic method ... Read More

Live video streaming is all the rage these days, with both regular users and influencers using it to have their voice heard. Businesses aren’t standing on the sidelines either because they are aware of all the benefits live video content can provide. First of all, video is cheaper than ever to produce. Second, live video is great for engaging your followers, increasing awareness about your business and brand, and ultimately, generating leads and driving more customers your way. Video content can also make complicated subject matter more easily digestible.

If you are serious about live video streaming, Facebook and YouTube are the most obvious platforms and let’s be honest, the best choices out there. Both are massive. YouTube is not only the world’s largest video platform but the second largest search engine. And of course, I don’t have to tell you that Facebook is the most prominent social media platform of them all. Although YouTube started streaming live video in 2011, and Facebook didn’t add the feature until five years later, they seem to be evenly matched.

In this blog, we’ll compare Facebook and YouTube features to help you decide which platform is better for your business.

1. User Experience and Features

YouTube has video monetization with their YouTube Partner Program. Facebook has ad breaks currently in beta testing for select users. However, most people don’t like it when they are aggressively pitched to, so this should be used sparingly. If you are looking spread awareness about your brand, Facebook content has the potential to go viral.

Live video on Facebook collects most of its views on the day the video is streamed, while YouTube views are typically gathered over a more extended period of time. In fact, Facebook treats live video as any other kind of content, with the newest being placed at the top of the newsfeed, and the oldest being mostly forgotten. YouTube content is archived and can be accessed for a long time after that.

2. Quality of Service and Videos

Facebook limits the resolution of its live video streams to 720p, as well as to 30fps. YouTube allows video to be streamed at resolutions up to 4K and 60fps. These days, internet connections are fast enough to support this type of stream, and you would be hard-pressed to come across a newer camera or phone which doesn’t capture video in 1080p. The quality of video comes into play with repeated viewings and YouTube knows this.

However, most Facebook users watch live video streams on mobile devices where 720p resolution is more than satisfactory. Facebook also does a better job of notifying its users about live streams with push notifications. While YouTube will inform the user and pretty much leave it at that, Facebook will send you a notification an hour before, 20 minutes before, and one minute before the stream goes live. It also notifies users who are actively using the app that a live stream is currently happening.

3. Reach

Facebook Live has over 1.9 billion active users per month while YouTube Live has over 1.3 billion of active users. Because of Facebook’s shorter lifespan, YouTube is better for content that is more evergreen such as product reviews, influencer conversations, instructional videos on how to use your product, and the like.

Facebook allows you to capitalize on content that has the potential to benefit from viral reach such as timely news pieces, product announcements, and relationship building content. It also allows you to nurture a more personal connection with your followers and provide a better user experience. Facebook Live map is another excellent feature because it shows a map of all active live video streams across the globe. Apart from location, it also displays the popularity of the video. The more popular the video, the larger it appears on the map.

4. Engagement

Since Facebook is primarily a social network, it allows you to interact with video in pretty much the same way as you would with any other content: by leaving comments and sharing statuses. On top of that, Facebook also has verified Pages which allows businesses and influencers to build their brands more efficiently. YouTube is trying to do more of the same with its Community and Super Chat features. Both of these exist to enable users to interact and engage as they would on social media. As Facebook’s algorithm is continually changing, it can be a challenge for brands to navigate, similar to Google’s YouTube.

Choosing what platform is right for your video needs is ultimately dependent on the kind of business you run. Now that you know more about each one, you will be able to make a more informed choice. Do you use Facebook or YouTube for video content? Which platform is better suited for your business? Tell me about what you’re doing in the comments!

Spring cleaning. Every time Spring rolls around, all you hear is “it’s time for a little ‘spring cleaning’”. I don’t know about you, but when the weather finally does turn pleasant, I do not want to spend my time indoors cleaning. Which is why I am a huge fan of “Dead of Winter Cleaning”. A little elbow grease and organization now means you will be reaping the benefits by MLB’s Opening Day.

To help you spiffy up your accounts and your processes, I have compiled a short list of chores. The “PPC Dead of Winter Cleaning Chores Checklist” does not roll off the tongue, but I promise you the tasks are simple and the rewards great.

Chore #1: Status Check

There are several great project management platforms on the market these days. And several of those platforms have free versions. If you are managing multiple PPC campaigns on your own, or if you are in-house and are not at liberty to allocate company resources to purchase the (oftentimes) expensive versions of these tools, then you might need something else to help you stay organized.

Here at Hanapin, we are big fans of the Status Doc. Over the years, the “Status Doc” has had many iterations.

An Excel doc that was updated and emailed to the team/client every week.

A Google Drive Doc that was just a long-running list of tasks and due dates.

Basecamp notes and to-do lists.

Here is an old status doc I dug up of a multi-brand account. Warning, if you are anything like me, this might make your skin crawl.

Google Sheets Status Doc for Multi-Brand Account

So much going on in that one. No idea what is important. No idea what the colors mean. The current version of the status doc I am using right now is the Internal/External Status doc on the Google Drive.

Here is what it looks like. On the top is the internal status document, filled with tasks, assignments, priority, notes, important dates, etc. On the bottom is the external, an almost replica of the internal, but trimmed down for easier consumption. Here’s the kicker: I only update one of these docs. I use the IMPORTRANGE function to pull the things I need from the internal to the external, thereby providing my clients with an easy way to see what is going on in the account.

Internal Status Doc
External, or Client-Facing, Status Doc

One of the other great things about using a Google Sheet like this is the Comment function. If I need to assign a task to a team member, or get their feedback on an item, I simply right click a cell, hit ‘Insert Comment’ then type “+” plus the team member’s email, hit assign and Google will send a notification to that person complete with a link to the doc.

Chore #2: Get rid of keywords collecting cobwebs

I have a rule in my house: if you haven’t touched an item in a year, whether it be an article of clothing, a cooking utensil, or a decorative pillow, get rid of it. If a keyword is sitting in your account, gathering dust for more than a year, get rid of it. Look at conversions. Look at assisted conversions. Zeros? Time to ask why. Does it have a low search volume? Is the bid set below first page? Basically, is there any work that can be done to this keyword to make it shine or is it time to pause or remove it? Whether you choose to pause it or remove it completely is up to you, I just advise you stick a label on it. The label can be something like “0 Conversions Past Year” or, if you are feeling playful “Lame Duck”.

AdWords can make it easy for you in the Opportunities section of the new UI, but make sure you are doing a thorough check you won’t be negatively impacting your campaigns.

Chore #3: Air out your ad copy

Ad copy can become stale, fast. And while any account manager worth his or her salt is testing ad copy on a regular basis, I like to try something drastically different every now and then. Right now, I am testing very specific sitelink copy to pair with certain campaigns. I’ve never had much success with conversions from direct clicks on sitelinks. But could adding specific sitelinks to specific campaigns at specific times of the year create the punchiness I’m looking for and give the campaign a boost to CTR? Maybe! Once I have enough data, I’ll be sure to report back.

But for now, here are a few suggestions to get you started on refreshed copy:

Dynamic Keyword Insertion: this is no new trick, but have you tested it in a while?

Ad Customizers: do you have a mobile friendly site? If you do, test out the if/then function in your ad copy. (And if you don’t have a mobile-friendly site, read about meeting the needs of your mobile visitors)

Value Proposition: you got a USP? (yeah you know me!) Is your USP clear in your ad copy? Can you move it to Headline 2? Headline 1?

Using strikethrough text: admittedly, I have never tested this but have seen some buzz about this on Twitter. I think it is a brilliant test and would love to see results!

Chore #4: Fix broken campaigns

We all have that one thing in our house that has been broken for a while, but we keep it around because we know it can be fixed we just haven’t taken the time to fix it. For me, it is the motherboard for the water and ice dispenser on my refrigerator. I have the ability to get water from the sink, and the ice maker still makes ice, so I basically just ignore it.

The same thing can happen in our accounts. A campaign can over time drop off and stop performing. And maybe because all of the other campaigns are doing well, we put a few bandaids on the underperformer and focus on the stuff that is still working.

Time is up! Fix it and move on. A great tool our analyst team developed is the Date Range Comparison Supermetrics Dashboard. I won’t go into the nitty gritty details of how to create this Supermetrics Masterpiece (for more information on how super Supermetrics can be, see Dan Rocklin’s January post Unlock New Functionality and Save Time with Supermetrics Queries). But I will show you what this dashboard looks like in hopes of getting those “fix-it” juices flowing.

Start by identifying the last period of strong performance. You can do this at the campaign level, ad group level. I recommend starting at the account level and drilling down from there. Then look at the same number of days for the time of poor performance. Then get out your pencils and start taking notes.

Compare the apples to the other apples. Does anything stand out overall. Did CPCs rise? Why?

Of the keywords that converted during your period of strong performance, what are they doing now?

Anything change with how you are tracking conversions?

How has traffic changed by day of week?

Did you introduce a mobile site? Did it impact performance?

Did you change your landing pages?

As you go through this exercise, chances are you are going to uncover something quite simple. Pat yourself on the back, make the changes, and go back to being awesome.

Chore #5: Plant some new seeds

You may be the lucky operator of a well-oiled account. Performance is steady. Profits are consistent. You are hitting your goals. Fantastic. But whether or not this describes your account, this next chore is for you.

If you aren’t growing your account, one might say that you are stagnant. But I will take that one step further and say that if you aren’t even aiming for just the slightest incremental growth your account, then you are moving backwards. The speed at which our industry is changing, even the healthiest of accounts can be left in the dust if you aren’t growing and changing with it. So now is the time to try new things. These do not have to be big grand new initiatives.

One way to start “seeds” is to create new audiences and set them to your campaigns to observe different behaviors.

Create an audience based on time on site

Create custom affinity audiences

Create audiences based on pages where they drop out of the conversion funnel

Not all audiences will bear fruit. But you might just gain some fantastic insight that could spark ideas for new campaigns, new targets, new bid modifications that will ultimately move that needle that has been holding steady toward increased profits.

Winter is Here, for Another Month or so Anyway

Not all of us are so lucky as to live in an area where winter means a mild 70 degrees and sunshine. If you live in an area like I do, the ground is frozen, the trees are bare, and the air stings your face when you walk outside. No better time than now to cozy up with your favorite account and treat it to a nice “Dead of Winter Cleaning.” I really think the phrase will catch on soon.

As I learned at the start of February, if you’re a lucky enough to get one-on-one time with Purna Virji, Senior Manager of Global Engagement at Microsoft, you ask her about the future of search (because she makes it sound so exciting).

Purna—with over X years of experience in pay per click, search and now AI, is on the forefront of what’s coming down the pipeline in our industry and—along with training her brand new golden lab puppy Peanut Butter—she’s joining us on February 21st as part of Marketing Optimization Week to chat about how you can prepare for AI.

Check out our video chat below, or read on for the transcript of our Q&A.

Jen: What do you imagine the day to day life of a marketer will be like in the future with access to exciting AI? You grab your morning coffee, logon to your computer, then what?

Purna: You’ll be getting all kinds of wonderful notifications about performance, new insights, and new ideas for engaging with your audience. AI, for us, solves some of our biggest problems—including [how to] engage with our audience in this world full of distractions. Like, how do you find the right way to cut through the noise and get through?

That’s where AI is super helpful because a) it can analyze all of the different data and touchpoints to see what’s working and what’s not working, and b) it can help us get really good at personalization and engaging with people in the way they’d like to be engaged with.

It also gives us new interfaces, things like chatbots or digital assistants, as well as virtual reality. So if I tempt somebody through a chatbot to come in and look at the latest collection of shoes, I can just put on my hololens and take a look at a 3D hologram in front of me of all the latest styles of shoes. It’s really cool ways to engage with brands and people in a very seamless manner.

Jen: You’re speaking at Unbounce’s Marketing Optimization Week this February 21st on how to prepare for AI’s emerging role in marketing. As a preview to your talk, can you share one of those things we can all prep for when it comes to AI?

Purna: Yes! I think one of the things marketers can prepare for is to understand what AI can do for us and try to touch the waters a bit more with a chatbot. I’ll be giving people some tips for how you can incorporate a chatbot within search. For example, Bing offers a Bing conversational bot right in the SERPs itself. So i’ll give some tips on A) how you can set it up and B) what’s a strategy you can use for your bot.

Jen: Chatbots are very hot right now.

Purna: It’s because they’re so easy and convenient. You’re already using a platform you’re familiar with—whether it’s skype or facebook messenger or Kik—or whatever platform you use to talk to your friends. And it’s very seamless;. In that same platform where I talk to my friends, I can order a pizza or check on a status of my order, or do anything I need to do with a brand in that same place. There’s no multiple hops that have to happen.

Jen: It seems like for customers, chat is very natural. It’s how we already go about our world. So as you said, very seamless.

Pruna: yes—conversation is the first thing we learn. From babies to now arguing about who’s going to take the trash out.Conversation is [still] the forefront of all of our lives.

Jen: Here at Unbounce we’re a Conversion Platform for marketers, and many of our customers pair landing pages with PPC in social or search. How do you see AI impacting pay per click the most in the next few years?

Purna: I think AI will have a couple of different roles. For one —it’s going to make it easier to hone into the right person. We’re already seeing some signs of this with our much more advanced audience targeting, such as In Market Audiences—which lets you slice and dice audiences based on people who are more likely to buy —so it’s going to be in reaching the right person and the right time, and B) it’s going to help us take a lot of the effort and pain out of the administrative side. We saw this with bit automations and things like that that came in that reduce the time that people talk, so it’ll make things like reporting a lot easier, keyword research a lot easier. Anything that’s really a repetitive task can get automated and can be improved by AI to make life easier. Time savings and more effective ads – it’s a win win for all.

Jen: Y’know, we hear some marketers kind of demonize AI, or they think of it as this sort of ex machina. they see it in a sort of detrimental way.

Purna: I don’t think so. I think the way AI has been designed and actually the way companies like Microsoft, Google or IBM, who are at the forefront of creating AI — i think the responsibility is on people like us to infuse the technology to respect humans. And, I mean, that’s one of the pillars we’re building our AI on, that it is respectful to the human, it’s there to augment what we can do it’s not there to replace us or destroy us or anything like that. All it’s doing is taking what we’re good at and giving us a little super power. It’s like wearing a little jet pack so we can run faster or slide faster, that’s all that it’s doing. When you think of it that way it’s giving us gifts that we didn’t have access to before.

Jen: You’re no stranger to setting up an AdWords or Bing campaign. So, what’s a little known technique that anyone managing paid spend can do today for more impact with their PPC ads?

Purna: I say there are two things. The first one Make sure you’re implementing in market audiences. That is —i think—If someone was to ask me what’s one tip for success for 2018, i’m a big believer of the power of In Market Audiences, it’s still in pilot in open beta so anyone can sign up an be a part of it (it’s not live yet) and test it. Throughout the testing period we’ve seen such amazing results from many people. Allows you to reach and audience that’s in teh market or looking to buy those specific products or services you’re seling. We have over 120 different categories, so if you just layer them on to your existing ad groups or campaigns and just adjust the bids accordingly, you have a better chance of reaching people who are interested in what you sell but may not know who you are…you’re just reaching this very qualified audience.

If you can do that and combine it with the wonderful landing page learnings you get with the Unbounce tool, I think that’s a really win win solution.

Jen: We know voice search is going to have a much bigger role to play, with Gartner predicting that by 2020, 30% of all web browsing sessions will be screenless. What should PPC’ers be thinking about to prepare for voice search?

Purna: We are seeing voice being adopted more and more. We’ve seen Mary Meaker’s internet study she shared that Google said that 20% of their mobile traffic is voice now, because voice is easy.

I would say PPC marketers should think about the differences or what’s unique to voice. A) it tends to be much more local. If you’re running local campaigns you want to think about, what are the queries that would relate to your business that people may ask if they’re in a hurry or on the go.

And B) all marketers (including SEOs too) should think about: are we providing the right information? I.e. do we have some sort of structured data or, for example, schema markup that can give the search engine much more insights into understanding what the page or information is about.

Lastly, [we can] look at the keywords. Voice is of course more conversational and with conversational queries, we tend to have longer phrases, we’re much more clear on the intent. If you can look at testing some of the most common, broader questions or prhases that get asked and actually test adding them in keywords and what could be the right way to answer it.

In the old days (ha, just last year!) what we would do is look for shoes or mens sandles, go to the website, select colours, size width, but now with voice you self-select in the query itself. You say “show me blue strappy summer sandles in size 8”. So if i then [have] to go to the website and do the selections again i’d be quite annoyed, but if i got to a page that showed just what i was looking for? It’s about making it very seamless for the customer.

Jen: so prepare for more granularity…Purna: exactly, [it’s] on page as well, which is why it’s important to look at some of the landing page options you have, [and ask] —“are we answering the right questions” in the right way.

Jen: You’ve seen dozens of landing pages for PPC. What do you think is the biggest mistake people make when creating landing pages to pair with their search ads?

Purna: It’s not being specific enough. If [someone’s] looking for something and your ad promises something, does your page deliver on that promise? So if i’m doing a search for waterproof digitla cameras and i see an ad that talks about waterproof digital cameras on sale, and i go on your landing page and its all of your digital cameras —again you’re giving the searcher more work to do. So you want to make life as easy as possible, answer the right questions, and don’t go to broad. Yes – there’s the temptation, especially with newbie PPC marketers— Let’s just send people to the homepage. As you know that’s just not going to work and they’ll realize that soon.

Also, as you say, the call to action—even sales people fail at this sometimes—you don’t or forget to ask exactly what you want [visitors] to do. So making sure you do that is a huge advantage.

We are only 2 weeks away from the PPC Hero Summit – a free online event offering top-notch PPC training and valuable discussions on trends and updates. Last week, we dove a little deeper into the first two sessions of the Summit. Today, we’ll talk about 2 more!

You optimize your ppc ad copy, you’ve been reading about AI and you’re continuing to pump out high value content. You do all the things any good digital marketer should do.

But, somehow, you’re not getting the results you used to. In the back of your mind, you know why. Competition is fiercer. Audiences are savvier. Between pay to play, machine learning, automation, hyper-targeting and a suspicious amount of digital marketing “gurus” touting the next big thing, getting the results you need can feel like an uphill battle.

Luckily, we can help.

I’m pumped to invite you toMarketing Optimization Week—four days of free online workshops designed to help you future-proof your marketing and get more out of the channels you already use.

Marketing has gotten a lot harder, and so has finding practical advice that getsreal results. Which is why we asked a bunch of bona fide marketing pros to share their tactics and tools for success that you can implement right away. You’ll recognize some Hana-experts – Diane Anselmo and Jeff Baum will have a session on how to beef up your AdWords quality scores!

Plus, when you register you’ll get a chance to win the Ultimate Marketing Optimization Kit, retailing at over $4,000 and including two tickets to Call to Action Conference!

Skip the hundreds of emails and articles and insteadjoin us February 20th – 23rdto learn how to get guaranteed results from your marketing efforts in 2018, and beyond.

Author

Pleasure to introduce myself I am Rachel 28 years old. I have been working in digital marketing for 6 years. I have worked with many agencies and have learnt a lot. I have opened up my own marketing agency to help local clients.